


'Alchemy' Snippets

by Scedasticity



Series: Alchemy [5]
Category: Shadow Unit
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 21:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scedasticity/pseuds/Scedasticity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits and pieces with the Aldriches which don't quite qualify as stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Free Radicals I

Getting information out of the Aldriches is a little like exploring the Three Bears' house. Lexy scrutinizes every question -- presumably for signs they are planning to use the information against them -- and seems to go through several mental drafts of answers. Alby, nine times out of ten, prioritizes attention over privacy and will share more than you really wanted to know. Fred's more reasonable -- but also the least in-the-know.  
  
*********  
  
Well, they never specifically said not to post any more videos of exploding tomato paste. (It's more impressive when it starts out in the can.) (The first in-the-can version was a little too interesting and did not get posted anywhere, because the camera was taken out by shrapnel.)  
  
********  
  
Marjorie Aldrich's family died when she was nineteen. A poorly maintained tour bus went off a cliff, carrying her family reunion. Marjorie and an uncle were wearing seatbelts and survived the initial impact, but he bled out waiting for rescue workers to arrive. She was a few feet from the bodies.  
  
********  
  
"Lexy and Fred will tell you it got really bad after the gymnastics fight -- has anyone told you about the gymnastics fight? Fred joined the high school gymnastics team, but told Mom he'd joined the basketball team, and when she found out she exploded. Anyway, they'll say it was that fight, but the thing is, Fred lied about it. And Lexy never questioned him lying. Why would they do that, if things weren't bad?"  
  
********  
  
"I'm, uh, sort of in the hospital. I got a flu shot, and then I was trying to look-look at the vaccine, and I possibly got a little carried away and didn't notice I was hungry. So I passed out, and then I got the flu too, and Lexy made me go to the hospital. She says I don't get to have an opinion because it's all my own fault. The flu shot was her idea, though."  
  
********  
  
 _Greetings and welcome to the Aldrich household! You are the _____ nanny in _____ years. So far, ______ have quit, ______ have been fired, and the average length of employment is ______. So please excuse Bertie if she doesn't bother to learn your name._


	2. Free Radicals II

Chloe is their cousin on their father's side (they don't seem to have any relatives on their mother's side). In fact, her father and their father are identical twins. Also, Chloe's father is being treated for depression. Fred thinks this should probably make it easier to forgive the whole Japan thing. Maybe it would if the best way to find out what's going on with Dad wasn't to ask Chloe to ask her dad.  
  
********  
  
Their father didn't come to Alby's high school graduation, but that was okay -- he hadn't come to Lexy's college graduation, either. And he sent a card and a present (some Japanese perfumes, which was cool) for her eighteenth birthday. (Normally for their birthdays Grandmom and Granddad send a card and some money and forge his signature, but they don't forge it very well and it isn't MAILED FROM JAPAN, so no one's really fooled.)  
  
*********  
  
Their fifth nanny quit when Marjorie complained that Alby's fingernails were not the correct shape. Not longer after, Lexy (who was fifteen) swore off nail polish after it took her three tries to apply it in a way judged acceptable. When Fred was fifteen, he was grounded for a week for painting his toenails black. When Alby was fifteen, she spent three and a half hours filing her nails into points (after considerably longer growing them long enough). She kept them that way for a month until she broke one.  
  
Marjorie never said a word.  
  
************  
  
All the Aldriches went to public school. Alby isn't sure why. Possibly they weren't so pretentious when Lexy started school, and then if public was good enough for Lexy, it was good enough for Fred and Alby? That didn't explain why they never transferred Lexy, but Fred suggested maybe their mother forgot Lexy wasn't in private school. There wasn't really anything wrong with the school. The building was clean, the class sizes were under forty, and the textbooks were younger than the students.  
  
**********  
  
The police didn't release many details, because the victims were in high school and one was underage, but as it happened the party hostess had a dumpy, chubby, pimply, braces-wearing, freshman sister who liked to listen at doors. Marissa Pederson went on to achieve an unprecedented rise in popularity by sharing all the explicit details, and some she probably made up, with everyone who asked her.  
  
***********  
  
No one was sure why Alby Aldrich suddenly went all D.A.R.E. in the middle of senior year -- maybe a bad trip, she looked pretty freaked out for a while -- but most people figured that was probably why she stopped talking to all her friends. Like she thought she was too good for them or something.  
  
************  
  
Alby's cooking skills are somewhat limited, but she gets by. When she was twelve, the nanny decided Fred and Alby needed to learn to cook. Alby produced a spaghetti dinner. The sauce, it quickly came out, was in fact an entire bottle of Asian chili sauce. The nanny didn't quit, but it was a near thing. Alby ate all the spaghetti.


	3. Homogeneity

Things Alby Has Been Prevented From Eating on One or More Occasion(s)

\--Kitchen sponge  
\--Sea sponge with paint  
\--Sea sponge without paint  
\--Baby shampoo  
\--Grown-up shampoo  
\--Nail varnish  
\--Furniture polish  
\--Antifreeze  
\--White Castle  
\--Ice cream sandwich on floor in mall  
\--Hot dog on floor in mall  
\--Pizza on floor in mall  
\--Deadly Nightshade  
\--Foam rubber paintbrush with house paint  
\--Raw chicken guts  
\--Lego  
\--Cigarette butts  
\--Most of Fred's fourteenth birthday cake (barely)  
\--Entire bottle of cough syrup

Things Alby Has Actually Eaten on One or More Occasion(s)

\--Cafeteria-produced vegetables rejected by elementary school classmates  
\--A jug of maple syrup on a single waffle  
\--Two bottles of eggnog at one meal  
\--Half of Lexy's sixteenth birthday cake, prior to the party  
\--French silk pie  
\--Custard pie  
\--Five servings of chocolate mousse  
\--An estimated ten pounds of dandelions over the years  
\--Straight food coloring (age eight, and only once: it was proclaimed to be "BORING!")  
\--Watercolor paints (in third-grade art)  
\--Gingerbread houses  
\--Mixed birdseed  
\--Pizza off floor in cafeteria (usually on a dare)  
\--Hash brownies (ages twelve through seventeen)  
\--Lead-contaminated fish (at least twice, because it's "cool")  
\--Play-doh  
\--Silly Putty  
\--Elmer's glue  
\--Paste  
\--Crisco  
\--Bottle of Canola oil  
\--Half a bottle of multivitamins  
\--Every single complimentary mint at restaurant host's desk thing  
\--Chocolate-covered coffee beans  
\--Raw potatoes  
\--Uncooked pasta  
\--Orange peel  
\--Apple core  
\--Pineapple skin  
\--Bottle of chocolate sprinkles  
\--Tube of cake frosting  
\--Box of sugar cubes  
\--Three cans of baked beans at one meal (Never. Again. Even though she has to admit she's curious how it would "look" these days.)  
\--Milk with BGH  
\--Irradiated meat  
\--Semi-exploded banana  
\--Concession food from virtually every venue in the metro area  
\--WonderBread  
\--An entire bucket of KFC (while producing five very greasy pages of speculation about the eleven secret ingredients)

Things Alby Actually Enjoys Eating:  
\--Hash brownies (chemicals and direct neurological effects)  
\--Ice cream sundae with caramel *and* hot fudge sauce, and multiple kinds of sprinkles, especially new brands every time (temperature, texture, and chemical composition)  
\--WonderBread ("What do you mean, bland? This stuff is *amazing*--")  
\--Any kind of hot pepper  
\--Active culture yogurt  
\--Dippin' Dots  
\--Lunch meats with preservatives  
\--Mixed birdseed


	4. Corrosives

It's a good thing Alby Aldrich is who (and what) she is.

"The Human Smoke Detector" is one thing, but her external ability?  It's potentially very dangerous, and potentially very hard to track, if it were being used by someone other than an attention-seeking teenager.  The range is short, but it doesn't require physical contact, and the limits seem to depend on concentration and imagination.  Bradley Tate and Jim Meisner are very lucky that what came to mind was how their own drug contained elements that could hurt them, and not -- among other possibilities -- that the human body contains a lot of sodium chloride which would do some interesting things as dichloride and sodium.

In some ways the Magic Overnight Aluminum Rust is even more problematic.  How could you contain someone with the ability to corrode _anything_?  Plastic might be more difficult than metal, but it's made of complex molecules which probably wouldn't hold their shape if broken.  Stone, maybe, or glass.  But even that might just be a matter of time and thought.  Or _thick_ walls, constantly replaced.  But in any event, not simple.

And as for the flu shot incident...  Everyone seems to be pretending to think she just overtaxed herself and that particular dose happened not to work.  More likely, she 'looked' at the vaccine too hard and 'broke' it somehow.  Hopefully not as likely but still possible, she not only 'broke' the vaccine, she resurrected the dead virus in the vaccine and so got the flu immediately.

Potentially _very_ dangerous.

Lexy knows it, too.  She's never quite come out and asked what they'll do if they decide Alby's dangerous, but she thinks about it -- researches civil commitment laws and assorted rulings on _habeas corpus_ , and follows up every single possibly-this-sort-of-thing incident Chloe came up with to see how it played out.  And she watches them when they talk to Alby, her back straight and eyes narrowed.

Sometimes Todd wants to tell her she's worrying about the wrong family member.

Because Alby _is_ who and what she is, and who she is is a _kid_ who has only ever deliberately injured anyone in self-defense.  What she is is a beta, genetic damage and all.  (Lexy wasn't very happy about the DNA test, but Alby is _legally_ an adult.)  They really aren't worried about what she's going to do. Reyes, Todd knows, has been trying to figure out how to recruit her.  (So far there's no plan.)

But _because_ Alby's a beta...

They haven't linked Marjorie to any deaths, or to anything beyond stressed-out employees and messed-up children.  But they're looking, and they're watching.  Just in case.

 


	5. Rough timeline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An approximate timeline for the 'Alchemy' characters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While working this out, I discovered Lexy took a year off between college graduation and law school! Whoops.

ca. 1960 -- Marjorie born, Alvin and Drew Friedman born  
ca. 1980 -- Marjorie's family dies  
ca. 1983 -- Marjorie and Alvin marry  
Jan 1984 -- Lexy born  
1984/1985 -- Chloe born  
Dec 1985 -- Fred born  
April 1991 -- Marjorie in fender-bender, Alby born; Lexy is 7, Fred is 5  
1998 -- Marjorie and Alvin separate [Lexy 14]  
1999 -- Smoking Nanny/Human Smoke Detector incident  
1999ish -- Speedway Nanny  
2000 -- "Why My Taste Is Not A Matter Of Taste"  
2000, June-Dec -- recordsetting nanny fired when Fred gets D in 9th-grade English  
2001 -- Fred grounded for painting toenails black  
2002, Jan -- Lexy learns about trust fund  
2002, June -- Lexy graduates high school, Fred is 16  
2002/2003 -- Lexy has meltdown, starts therapy  
2003ish -- Cooking Nanny, chili sauce spaghetti  
early 2004 -- Gymnastics Fight  
2004, June -- Fred graduates high school, Lexy is 20  
2005ish? -- Fish-killing Nanny?  
2006, May/June -- Lexy graduates college  
2006ish -- Alby files nails into points  
2006-2007 -- Lexy takes a year off from school, I guess...  
spring 2007 -- Alby reports fake toxic Ecstasy  
summer/fall 2007 -- Lexy moves back home, starts law school  
2007 or 2008 -- Chloe starts grad school  
Nov 22/23 2008 -- party; Alby breaks through -- Alby is seventeen  
spring 2009 -- many entertaining incidents at Hillview High School  
Apr 2009 -- Alby turns 18  
June 2009 -- Alby graduates high school -- Fred graduates college [five years]?  
fall 2009, Alby starts technical college  
mid-fall 2009 [midterms] -- Chemistry -- Alby is eighteen  
spring 2010 -- Lexy's presumed completion of law school  
2010(?) -- Fred plays ninja smartphone  
Nov 2010? -- Meisner thing?  
March 2011 -- Japan earthquake, Alvin still not returning to U.S.  
spring 2011 -- Alby's graduation from technical college  
2011 -- earliest possible graduation for Chloe (history, could be a while)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spring 2011: Scedasticity gets in a snit and stops speaking to Shadow Unit.


	6. Precipitates

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This... is not necessarily canonical, if I continue with this universe.

Her associate's degree came in the mail in early July. Alby reluctantly posed with it so Lexy could take pictures to send to their father and grandparents. Fred complained it looked much fancier than  _his_  degree, and wanted to compare it to Lexy's law degree; Lexy wouldn't cooperate. They went out to dinner. It was just the three of them this time -- Chloe had gone home for a long visit.  
  
Alby had been talking about having a real graduation party this time, and inviting everyone she knew, but.  
  
The next night, she went to Fred's place for beers. (She was still only twenty, and as ridiculous as it was, Lexy would not consume alcohol with her.) Fred put on the rough cut of his latest stuntery -- this time just doing gymnastics moves for an actor who couldn't.  
  
"You don't look very much alike," Alby pointed out after his first appearance.  
  
"Supposedly they're going to fix that as soon as they find a really good postproduction person who will work for peanuts."  
  
The film was slightly less surreal than the ninja smartphone thing, but it was longer, and arguably even more Deep and Meaningful, and seemed to include improbably many athletes with leprosy. Alby ate all the popcorn, so they had to throw spitballs at the TV instead.  
  
At the end, Alby sighed. "Keep doing theater film mild stunt stuff, Fred. Even if you have to tend bar and be ninja smartphones."  
  
"Planning on it, Alby."  
  
"Please, please,  _please_  forget I ever suggested the FBI."  
  
There were a lot of things Fred could have said, about stuntwork not being known for safety, and shit happened to anyone, at any time. But he just elbowed her, and said, "What makes you think I remember anything you tell me?"


End file.
